A cold treachery - Charles Todd [66]
It was as if she knew what she was talking about. As if accusations against her had shadowed her life. It could explain why she was content to stay here, at Mrs. Cummins' beck and call.
Instead of answering her, he said, “Cummins doesn't sound like a dale man.”
“No, he's from London. But he's lived here forever—for twenty years or more, I should think.” She smiled wryly. “He's still considered a stranger. For that matter, so am I. He bought this hotel and has tried to make a success of it, but sometimes I think he wishes he'd never set eyes on it.”
“His wife was saying that he'd served in Egypt.”
“Yes, that's true. He didn't like the East very much. He never talks about it. I don't think he's ever been happy. Isn't that a wretched thing to say about anyone? But I can't help it. He's haunted by something.” She stopped, suddenly embarrassed. “I shouldn't be saying such things to a policeman! Harry Cummins is a good man, I don't mean to make him sound otherwise.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “How late it is!”
She set her book aside and collected her own hot water bottle. “Good night, Inspector.”
He held the door for her and watched her wheel her chair down the passage.
As he reached for his own hot water bottle, he glanced down at the book she'd left behind.
It was one of O. A. Manning's slim volumes of poetry. Wings of Fire.
After a time he went to his own room and lighted the lamp. The room seemed to be full of ghosts, crowding him, and a wave of claustrophobia swept through him, driving him to open the door again and step into the passage, where the cold air of the unheated wing of the house seemed to swirl around him. The lamp dipped in the draft, and he could feel the beat of his heart like a drum that was too loud, reverberating through his body.
Hamish said, “You canna' escape fra' what you are and ha' been. . . .”
Rutledge answered him in the silence of the passage, “I can't live with it, either.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next morning Rutledge, with the map on the seat beside him in the motorcar, turned out of the hotel yard towards the bottom of Urskwater.
He followed a rutted lane into the yard of Apple Tree Farm. Dogs met him with lowered heads and suspicious growls. A woman came to the yard door to stare at him, uncertain who he was and why he had come.
“Inspector Rutledge, from London,” he called, without leaving the motorcar.
“My husband's in the barn—”
“Mrs. Haldnes? I'd like to ask you a few questions about the night that the Elcott family died—”
The uncertainty changed instantly to wariness. “I can't tell you anything—”
“No, I understand. Not about the murders. But I wondered—did your dogs bark that night? Did you find tracks in the snow where they shouldn't have been? Did your children appear to be worried about something?”
“A storm was coming. We had work to do. What were we likely to hear? Or to see? There's no reason to think the killer came this way, surely!”
“I was thinking about Josh—”
“I don't wish the lad any harm—my husband searched for him with the rest. But he wasn't friendly with my boys. They didn't get on well together.”
“He was in dire need; he might have tried to find help anywhere he could.”
“Yes, and we'd have done what we could, wouldn't we? But we never saw him.”
Hamish said, “She wasna' the sort of woman he would turn to. She's cold, and no' very motherly.”
Ignoring the voice, Rutledge said, “You're the closest farm.”
“That's as may be. But the track over the shoulder of the fell isn't the best there is.”
He thanked her and, when she'd called off the dogs, walked into the cold mustiness of the barn, meeting with an equal reticence in her husband. A sense of closing ranks.
But he could identify an undercurrent of superstition as well—as if speaking of the Elcotts and what had happened to them might somehow bring the same fate down on this family. To be ignorant was to be safe.
Rutledge drove on to South Farm, and found the